Marc Lee: Pic-me

Pic-me (2014) by Swiss artist Marc Lee invites you to virtually fly to the locations from where users send randomly selected posts to Instagram, thus creating another view on how the media handles posts on social networks. One might describe these posts – images or short videos accompanied by comments, tags and geolocalization – as a kind of digital small talk or personal conversation. Different than face to face conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated and archived by governments, corporations, and research institutes and then transformed into everlasting stories as well.

We can’t tell yet, what the consequences of archiving these often personal and emotional posts are in the long run. The work by Marc Lee makes us think about the properties of the digital realm and what happens to the data that is generated by people all over the globe. The project, available online at www.pic-me.com, will be presented in installation, interactive form.

Since 2012, Sabine Himmelsbach is the artistic director of the House of Electronic Arts Basel (HeK). An art historian, she has been director of the Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg (2005 – 2012) and head of the exhibition department of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe (1999 – 2005). More info: www.haus-ek.org